CHAPTER ELEVEN
A few mornings later, I sat in Cristiano’s living room, the cotton blanket from the couch wrapped around my shoulders. Light rain peppered the scene outside, striking the windows with little pitter patters. Evie had been staying with me and she’d only left a few minutes before to go to work. I knew I was probably safe in Cristiano’s building, but something about being alone scared me.
Each morning, afternoon, and evening I’d held my breath, waiting for any signs of the strange man, but he and his car were both a no show.
Perhaps he’d backed off, quit whatever mission he was on after my charging after him in the street.
But it didn’t seem likely. The only person I’d told about the event other than Cristiano was Evie, and she was just as curious about the whole issue as me. I definitely wasn’t telling my mom or anyone else who was likely to freak out.
I worked the fringe of the blanket in between my fingers and stared out at the city view. The apartment was quiet and tomb-like without Cristiano there. Though I’d dropped my stuff in the guest room down the hall from his bedroom I’d given that room over to Evie and spent every night sleeping in Cristiano’s bed, enjoying the smell of him left behind.
I stood and tossed the blanket back down onto the couch. I couldn’t sit around forever, wondering and worrying. It would drive me crazy. Luckily, it was Saturday morning, and the orphanage waited for me.
After a quick search in the foyer closet, I found an umbrella and headed out for the street.
One of the nicest thing about staying at Cristiano’s was the valet parking. I scanned the street as Russell, the daytime valet, got my car.
Traffic was at its usual flow for Saturday morning, with no SUVs in sight. I squinted at the passing windshields, checking out each passing driver. They were all strangers, and none of them seemed particularly interested in me.
And yet I couldn’t shake a strange feeling. One that made the hair rise on the back of my neck whenever I was out in the open. It felt like I was being watched, intently observed.
Perhaps I was still just shaken. Maybe that was it.
Or maybe my intuition was trying to get my attention.
Russell brought my car around. I thanked him and climbed in, taking the drive to the orphanage from Cristiano’s for the first time.
It wasn’t just the aftershocks of the encounter and the feeling of being watched that were bothering me. There was something else too. It was the way all the recent events in my life lined up.
I’d begun to suspect I was being followed right around the time I began seeing Cristiano. Even if he wasn’t the one having me followed, by that point I was almost certain that the stalking had some kind of connection to him.
I just needed to find out what the missing link was.
I kept the music off on my drive to the orphanage, too nervous to do anything but focus on the road and go over what I was going to say to Teresa. I needed to keep my questions to a minimum and make it sound like I was merely interested in Cristiano because I had a crush on him. I didn’t know if Teresa knew about us dating or not, but I wasn’t going to offer that extra information unless she made it obvious she knew.
After taking random turns and circling around the block several times, I felt safe enough to pull into the orphanage’s driveway. Still, I waited and watched, checking every car that went by before turning off mine off and going into the house. I actually felt a bit triumphant as I stepped through the door. Maybe confronting the driver of the SUV scared them off. Hopefully permanently.
Most of the kids were outside in the back yard. A few of the older ones had gone to some sort of book club at the library. Teresa assigned me to monitor the screen time a few of the kids were having in the main room. It was an easy enough job, sitting there and making sure the video games got turned off after thirty minutes. The job seemed pretty pointless since Teresa could have easily poked her head in the room herself after the allotted time was up. Another day being so unneeded might have made me feel bad, but that day I was on a mission and couldn’t be concerned with such petty things.
I played ‘store’ with a little girl named Samantha while I monitored the clock for the end of screen time. After Samantha got bored and wandered off to watch the older kids play some kind of jet ski racing game, I went to find Teresa.
She sat at the kitchen table, her sleeves rolled up, breaking the ends off green beans.
“How’s it going in there?” she cheerily asked.
I leaned against the door frame. “Good. Everyone’s pretty calm.” I looked down at the cowboy boots I’d gotten at Buffalo Exchange the year before. They were real leather and some of my favorite shoes. They were also decent for running.
I hated that I’d thought of the last part while getting dressed that morning.
“And how are things with you?” Teresa asked.
I put a smile on. “Really good.”
She winked at me. “I bet. Cristiano is a wonderful man.”
So she had heard of us. Good. That gave me just the segue I needed. I put on the best dreamy, in love look I could manage. “Yeah, he’s awesome. We’ve been spending a lot of time together. Mostly talking about our lives and stuff.” I hesitated, taking a second to read Teresa’s face. She smiled happily, looking like she was enjoying what I was saying. I pushed on. “He said that he wishes he could remember something before he came here... something about his life before.”
The way I looked at it, if my being followed was connected to Cristiano, there were two branches of logic to take from there. The first had to do with his current life. Perhaps a business associate or a competitor was having him watched and, by extension of me being in his life, having me watched as well. The second branch had to do with his past. This seemed to be the more illogical option, but since the orphanage was the easiest place to gather information, I was starting there. If that mission proved to be fruitless, I would move on to finding out as much as I could about Cristiano’s business and its competition.
Teresa frowned. “I know, it’s too bad.”
“You... you worked here when he got dropped off?”
She nodded. “I did.”
I licked my dry lips. “So you met the person who dropped him off?”
Her head tilted to the side, and her hands stilled their motion, a green bean left dangling between two fingers. A far away look crossed her face. I held my breath, almost afraid to speak lest I spook her and lose some much needed information.
“I did,” she finally said, her words heavy and slow.
“And it was his mother?”
“I...” She hesitated. “I don’t know for sure, Blaire.” She looked back down at the green bean. “I’ve already told Cristiano these things.”
“Oh... yes. Of course.”
I crossed my arms, not knowing what else to say. Teresa went back to her green beans, and I stood there for a second, trying to think of a new question. My mind felt blank though.
After a few more seconds, I managed to drag some words up from my brain’s depths. “I’ll go check on the kids.”
Everything was still peaceful in the main room, which meant I had more time to potentially get lost in my thoughts. Not wanting to do that, I pulled my cell phone out and got started researching Cristiano’s career. There weren’t too many specifics to be found and certainly nothing about competitors.
And what would competition even mean in the stock market? That area was something I knew next to nothing about, and if I wanted to get an edge, I needed to educate myself on that field first.
When I left the orphanage, I was just as dissatisfied as I’d been when arriving. Instead of going back to Cristiano’s, I drove around, doing circles in the neighborhood. It occurred to me that I could go visit my mom. She often stayed home on Saturdays to garden and do work on the house.
But what if I’m still being followed?
I would be followed to her house. I couldn’t risk that. Whatever was going on, there was no way I could let my mom get involved.
Teresa’s face at the kitchen table kept coming back to me. She’d seemed... sad when talking about Cristiano. The absent quality that came over her suggested there could be more to the story than she was letting on.
Maybe.
Hell, it was a shot.
And I was going to take it.
***
I parked a block away from the orphanage, waiting until it was full night to return. I moved swiftly along the sidewalk, scanning the areas in front of me as I fast walked along fences and trash bins. The guilt filling me nearly made me queasy. After all, what kind of sick and twisted bastard breaks into an orphanage?
One who needs answers, that’s who.
I’d been in the office a couple times, and knew exactly where it was. The first window didn’t budge, and neither did the second. Keeping close to the outer wall, I traced my way along the building, checking windows as I went. I got lucky with the kitchen, scrambling through its window like a chubby groundhog pushing itself into a too small burrow.
The old house’s floorboards creaked under my feet. Each time there was a noise, I froze, holding my breath and listening to see if anyone heard me. After the journey of a lifetime, I made it to the office.
Pulling out the little LED flashlight I brought, I did a quick sweep of the room. The light’s ray fell on three filing cabinets pushed together into the far corner. I gulped. Hopefully, the files were well organized, and I would find what I looked for in a cinch.
Some of the papers were newer, crisp and white, and some of them were older, fading and deteriorating at their sides. They were in alphabetical order, but some of them by last name and some by first. Since I knew the name Leventis had been given to Cristiano by himself once he’d grown up, I searched in the C’s first.
His folder was there, a slim and tan manila one. I gingerly worked it out of the drawer.
Something bumped above my head. I froze and clicked my flashlight off. Footsteps padded away, growing louder and then fainter. Still, I didn’t move. A minute later, a toilet flushed, then the footsteps traveled back across the floor.
Breathing a little better, I turned my flashlight back on and quickly looked over the few pages in the folder. The last two had information about foster homes. The first page contained the least amount of words, but I went back and started there.
In one minute, I knew everything I was probably going to get from the orphanage. What Teresa shared was the truth. Cristiano had been dropped off by a woman who supplied next to no information. She refused to give her name and only gave Cristiano’s first. Her English was broken and, according to Teresa, who took the notes, not easily placed. She hugged Cristiano goodbye and then disappeared into the night, never to return.
All of that I expected. But the information that came next I didn’t. As Cristiano learned English, he gave clues as to his life before the orphanage. He talked about living in a “big house on an island,” and about sneaking away in the night with his mother, about his father “going away,” and about there being “big booms.” I read the document over three times, absolutely riveted, though it wasn’t likely I would forget a word of it. There was too little information for me to do that.
Knowing there wasn’t likely to be anything else about Cristiano to be found outside of the folder, I stuffed the papers back into the filing cabinet. It creaked as I edged it shut. I paused again before crossing the hallway, giving myself a moment to read the house, and then darted for the kitchen window. The mission completed, I hit the grass and went running, slipping into the night with even more questions than I’d gone in with.